11/16/2020 // Day 6: Evan Isoline's Philosophy of the Sky Cover Reveal
It’s day 6 of 11, which means we are exactly halfway through our announcements! Today we are introducing Evan Isoline’s Philosophy of the Sky, forthcoming May 2021. A book that hangs in suspension between the earth and the sun.
Who is Evan Isoline?
Evan Isoline is a writer and visual artist living on the Oregon coast. He has work online, in chapbook form, and his full-length debut 'PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY' is forthcoming from 11:11 Press.
Nice! So, what’s Philosophy of the Sky about?
PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY is not a work of philosophy in an academic or traditional sense. It is, however, highly philosophical, totemic, and personal. In the book, Evan uses the sky as an abstract philosophical concept, like a cinematic backdrop, to explore conceptual associations between selfhood, objecthood, the body, apocalypticism, masculinity, masturbation, and self-destruction.
The text, symbol, and glyph are partially augmented by chance cut-up processes such as language translators, Markov chain generators, and AI natural language generators for the purpose of eliminating narrative preconception, discovering subconscious visual realms, and spotlighting a point of tension between natural and artificial aesthetic forms. The formatting of text becomes an important cinematographic framing tool.
Evan remarks: “By integrating CHANCE at such a level into the process of writing, the act of writing itself becomes a photographic process much like filmmaking: watching, waiting, seeing and capturing. The resulting text becomes an ode to ephemerality and chaos. This is me in a room. Auto-exorcising ghosts of information. Me hacking the god-source of the image priests. This is a scream into the apocalypse.”
He views the work as a contemporary mutation of cinematic language and devices into the realm of text, via a convergence of the possibilities of symbolist poetics and trope expansion in the genre of Horror. The narration is self-distancing yet confessional, offered as a disquieting map of a body turned inside out, an ontological map of fear and desire. Make no mistake, the text is anticipatory of its readership's sublimation of visual experience into mystical and distilled forms of voyeurism.
OMFG!
It’s off-the-wall brilliant and we are so excited to share the text in its physical form with you!
Stay up-to-date by following Evan here:
Twitter: @evan_isoline
Instagram: evan_isoline
- Andrew Wilt, Publisher, 11:11 Press